Chasing Waterfalls:

If your musical interests extend beyond the industrialized world,
you're sure to run into field recordings sooner or later. But that
doesn't mean you have to like them. Field recordings are for
scholars, obsessives, eccentrics, obscurantists, and pseuds. As
resources, realms of knowledge, the musics they preserve are
invaluable. But because they're local by definition, their value
isn't designed to travel, much less resonate with the
unacculturated. Back in the '70s--after living in the Bosavi region
of Papua New Guinea for months, becoming fluent in Kaluli dialect
and intimate with the many Kaluli songs he heard and recorded--Steven
Feld composed and performed and was ultimately moved to
tears by his own mourning song for two anthropologist colleagues
who'd returned to the States. Only then, he believes, did he begin
to get inside the way music felt to the Kaluli themselves. This,
Feld suggests, is something all too few ethnomusicologists manage.
So how is a simple rock and roller or "world music" fan going to do
the trick?

This puzzle hasn't stopped MacArthur laureate Feld from
constructing several albums of Kaluli songs and sounds, all author
royalties to the Bosavi People's Fund and the Institute of Papua
New Guinea Studies. And for me and whoever else happens to grok
this sliver of the audiosphere, his inconsistency betokens a large
mind. As rafts of scholars, pseuds, and Banana Republic customers
have demonstrated, you needn't get terribly far inside something to
get something out of it; one might even argue that such
expectations are puritanical. And so, while remaining unmoved by
ethnographic recordings from Indonesia to Nubia to Alabama to
Belize, I've connected big time to Smithsonian Folkways' rich and
lovely three-CD Bosavi.

Bosavi is a major rain forest in the foothills of the extinct
volcano for which it's named, home to 2000 people all told. Twelve
hundred of these are Kaluli, who like all Bosavi people sleep
communally in scattered longhouses and spend their days fishing,
hunting, gardening, and scraping a starchy staple called sago from
the wild palms that grow around their homeland's many streams. Or
anyway, that's how they lived before white explorers zapped them
in 1935. What with Christian missionaries threatening hellfire,
governments regulating burial and such, and logging and mining
companies tempting their young with money and commodities, things
have gotten a lot more complicated. In fact, most of the ceremonial
songs on Disc III are nearly extinct in ritual form. Some of these
were recent imports, brought in by visiting carriers or relatives
from other Bosavi locales. But gisalo was the pride of the Kaluli,
and the performance by Halawa on Track 5 took place at the very
last all-night gisalo ceremony, in 1984. Maybe the ritual will come
back--Feld's work has already helped fuel an indigenous
neotraditionalist tendency. But it will obviously never be the
same.

It's impossible to read Feld's Sound and Sentiment: Birds,
Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression without
experiencing this runaway evolution as loss. Here is a tiny people
that developed a complex poetic-onomatopoeic grammar for its seven-voweled
language (beet, bait, bet, bot, boot,
boat, and bought but not bite, bit, or but)
brimming with bird imitations and water
sounds. Kaluli deploy (or deployed) a metaphor system based
primarily on place names--7000 are cited in the 1000 songs Feld has
transcribed--and designed to provoke weeping. Often weeping itself
is (or was) literally sung, by women emulating the melodic contours
of certain fruitdove calls. Most Kaluli musical terms derive from
the vast vocabulary they use to describe waterfalls, as perhaps
does the overarching aesthetic Feld translates as "lift-up-over
sounding," in which musical elements are layered in patterns whose
apparent imprecision is intrinsic to their lifelike movement. It's
outrageous that Christian evangelicals could treat this culture
with the ignorant contempt sketched in the CD booklet--if anything,
the superiority lies with the heathens. But does that mean I'm
tempted to follow the text of Halawa's gisalo, to which Feld
devotes 50 pages?

Unfortunately, but also inevitably, no. The place names of
Kaluli metaphor compound geographical specificity ("this tree by
that creek") with psychological specificity. They graph unique
personal interactions within a topography only Kaluli who've roamed
Bosavi for decades can comprehend. So even if a musical tourist
were to penetrate the narrative references and subtle grammatical
and rhetorical poetics called into play, a bare semblance of
emotional connection would be the most he or she could hope. For
me, knowing about all this is fascinating and satisfying enough.
And as Feld, who is intensely aware of the contradictions of his
calling, understands full well, I would never have gotten that far
if the Kaluli--who since white people started watching have
devoured musical novelties from as near as eastern Bosavi and as
far off as the USA (they preferred Feld's Sidney Bechet cassette to
his Bird cassette, which they found way too fast)--hadn't embraced
a new fad: guitar bands.

With their imported instruments, unison vocals,
modern-to-Christian concerns, and roots in interlonghouse
competitions set up by the government-run regional high school, the
guitar bands are the musical
manifestation--which in such a sonic culture means the definitive
one--of the destruction of everything Feld holds dearest in Kaluli
life as well as Kaluli music: "lift-up-over sounding"'s out-of-phase
synchronicity, coming-together-within-chaos, self-starting
cooperation, participatory discrepancy. At first, he feared and
even deplored what the new music represents, but he's made his
adjustment. Where the Papua New Guinea name for the style is
"string band," the Kaluli call it gita gisalo, linking their
pronunciation of "guitar" with their signature genre. In addition
to radiating the kind of instant charm that often graces
undeveloped guitar musics--low on bass though they may
be, their declarative tunes and guileless vocal projection are hard
not to like--the 19 guitar-band songs that fill Disc
I of Bosavi take up themes of loss and sharing that are consciously
Kaluli. Feld also notes that many of the bands are fronted by
married couples, and that one performs the first Kaluli song ever
about the pervasive
practice of wife beating--genuine progress, cash nexus or no cash
nexus.

Especially for the first half of the disc, which Feld front-loads like
any canny producer, I'm quite taken with this stuff.
Compared, say, to the Ugandan guitar songs on the John Storm
Roberts-compiled Kampala Sound, the tunes have a sour, mournful
undertow, and the male-female leads, synchronized by Kaluli
standards, are raggedy around the edges. While not unmitigated
virtues, these are marks of character. Like the themes and
metaphors I can barely absorb, they help make the music Kaluli
rather than "world." But Feld is right--in the end, they're not
Kaluli enough, and they aren't where I made my connection. My
Kaluli breakthrough occurred while I was dutifully checking out
Disc II, "Sounds and Songs of Everyday Life."

Bosavi's predecessor was a 10,000-selling 1991 CD Feld
coproduced with Mickey Hart, Voices of the Rainforest, which
situated Kaluli vocal and instrumental music in an aural collage of
birds and insects, rainfall and running water, tree cutting and
brush clearing. It was soon followed by two musical soundscape CDs
from Central Africa: Mbuti Pygmies of the Ituri Rainforest, which
Feld's teacher Colin Turnbull originally put out in 1957 and 1958,
and Martin Cradick's Baka Pygmy Heart of the Forest, which lacks
Turnbull's subtlety but does include three water drum tracks and
the eternal "Nursery Rhyme." Both embodied the central point that
forest people live so much by their ears that for them musical
sounds occupy the same realm as natural ones, but the records
nevertheless continued to foreground music per se, notably the
Pygmies' sequentially hocketed singing, lift-up-over sounding if
anything is. For me, Voices of the Rainforest buries the music too
deep; I actually prefer Feld's musicless Rainforest Soundwalks
(EarthEar, 888-356-4918, earthear.com). But Disc II of Bosavi gets
the balance just right.

Starting with a whoop and a whap and incorporating much
yelling, singing, and crashing of timber, "A men's work group
clears a new garden" is as spirited and surprising as any field
holler I've ever heard. But that's just the set-up, because then
it's star time. Her name is Ulahi, one of Feld's chief advisors and
compeers, and though she garnered Voices of the Rainforest most of
its airplay--the Billie Holiday of Melanesia, Feld calls her--I
think she's far more striking here. Accompanied by the irregular
thud of sago preparation, progressively more labored breathing, a
squalling baby, and ambient birds and insects, her helayo song for
her dead grandmother is as beautiful as any new music I've heard
all year. In part this must be because its theory of beauty is so
local, so bound up in place. Her helayo, based on a male ritual
form that by the late-'70s recording date survived only in women's
learned and self-composed work songs, pursues the specifically
Kaluli goal of making listeners sentimental about the departed by
carefully ordering a list of the sites she or he shared with them.
But though this method certainly helps root and shape Ulahi's song,
those sites still mean nothing to me.

Instead, I'm responding to microtonal variations and
developments worked on minimal melody, to a softly burred timbre
imbued with thought, to the quietly miraculous liquidity of self-contained
vocal production betraying no sense of performance,although performance
is highly valued in other Kaluli music. I'm
responding to what I can only call pure music. It's humbling enough
to feel at whatever distance that these 1200 "primitives" could
have produced such an elaborate aesthetic. It's doubly humbling to
recognize that among the 1200 there's at least one who's achieved
what we in the West so arrogantly call genius.